by David Lehman
more of my stanzas with more of such
mortalities . . . Count them for yourself:
every one is dead. And I’m alive!
I know, I know: I can always read
them, but they can’t read themselves (or me).
You see? Doing anything, even
writing poems, is something
we all must be alive for—only
we’re not all alive. Not all alive . . .
Which is why we write, why I must write
this poem right now, this time around
at a mere eighty-five. Certainly
I didn’t know them all—the dead ones—
intimately. Some of those I loved
most (read most often) I never knew
really well. But once he or she died
I discovered that, as Tolstoy says,
they’d been the most precious, the dearest,
and most necessary of beings.
It’s unlikely I (or anyone)
will be celebrating his or her
ninety-fifth birthday. Or would even
want to. That’s why it occurred to me
—for reasons designated above—
this is the proper occasion to write
my eighty-fifth birthday poem now.
from The Yale Review
T. R. HUMMER
* * *
Minutiae
I never underestimate the housefly, its micro-mechanism
buzzed with vinegar and honey, its hairy guts
Splattered on the kitchen window. I pay homage likewise
to the spider and the wood louse, the emperor moth
And the wasp. All these souls precede us. Where would I be
without the carpenter ant and the exalted one, the scarab?
To live side by side on the earth is to suck one another dry.
I stand at the kitchen sink at twilight clipping
My fingernails into running water, not in fear of witchcraft
but of the Board of Health, if they inspected private homes.
In my gut (as in yours, Cleopatra my Empress my Queen) a horde
of silent germs labor over my recent dinner, processing,
Waging holy war. God is eternal surfeit, Heraclitus whispers.
I have grown too old to dream of whispering, and the grackles
Disdain to weep like their weakling cousin robins,
and the leaves and the moon have dissolved
Like vinyl records under acid rain in that cardboard box
I left in a leaky storeroom behind a house I lived in
Thirty years ago, full of rat pellets and moldy fertilizer sacks
and a tintype of a woman who died a year before
The Civil War: she is playing a parlor guitar
and maybe humming, she is calcium dust and wax,
A doll with my face, bristling with needles, bearing the secret
of her life like forgotten music gutting the twilight, vanished now
Into bacteria and potash and a soul particulate as galaxies.
from Hinchas de Poesía
ISHION HUTCHINSON
* * *
Morning Tableau
Intermittent drizzle on the orange roofs;
a barge slides russeting water, I awoke
and heard brass music from another century:
carriage tinkles and princes and parasols
the white of souls promenading by the river;
no tankers, no allies, just rows of lindens,
“without the broken crucifixes of swastikas,”
and a cortège of starred-arm people, clasped-hands,
shuffling to the prick of spires, by rote,
a voice terse script silting the sky.
A breeze then shatters the rain’s paralysis,
sheets away the corpse barge, lifts mist clear
off the roofs, blanches the sun’s fight to copper
the river to my love’s rye-colored skin
when she surrenders to summer in a hammock’s
sweep on the porch, and I watch over her shifts,
between the inferno and paradise, and hear
my reflection murmuring: my God, my heaven,
my all, and hear the leaves gnashing
where the trees are glinting shades forgetting
their journey to this place of morning.
from Connotation Press
MAJOR JACKSON
* * *
Aubade
after R.W.
You could be home boiling a pot
of tea as you sit on your terrace,
reading up on last night’s soccer shot
beneath a scarf of cirrus.
You could be diving headlong
into the waves of Cocoa Beach
or teaching Mao Tse-tung
whose theories are easy to reach
or dropping off your dry cleaning,
making the New Americans wealthier,
or mowing your lawn, greening
up, but isn’t this healthier?
Just imagine the hours you’re
not squandering away,
nor the antlike minutes frittered
with a tentative fiancé.
Your whole body agrees you’d
rather lie here like a snail
in my arm’s crook, nude
and oblivious of all emails.
Yes, it’s nearly one o’clock,
but we have more reasons
to kiss, to engage in small talk.
For one, these blissful seasons
are short, & tomorrow is never
insured, so bounce downstairs:
pour us glasses of whatever,
a tray of crackers, bosc pears,
then let drop your sarong,
the wind high on your skin,
so we can test all day long
the notion of original sin.
from The New Yorker
LAWRENCE JOSEPH
* * *
Visions of Labor
I will have writings written all over it
in human words: wrote Blake. A running
form, Pound’s Blake: shouting, whirling
his arms, his eyes rolling, whirling like flaming
cartwheels. Put it this way, in this language:
a blow in the small of the back from a rifle butt,
the crack of a blackjack on a skull, face
beaten to a pulp, punched in the nose
with a fist, glasses flying off, “fuckin’ Wobblie
wop, hit him again for me,” rifle barrel slammed
against the knees, so much blood in the eyes,
rain, and the night, and the shooting pain
all up and down the spine, can’t see. Put it
this way: in the sense of smell is an acrid
odor of scorched metal, in the sense of sound,
the roaring of blow torches. Put it in this
language: labor’s value is abstract value,
abstracted into space in which a milling machine
cutter cuts through the hand, the end of her thumb
nearly cut off, metal shavings driven in, rapidly
infected. Put it at this point, the point at which
capital is most inhumane, unsentimental,
out of control: the quantity of human labor in
the digital manufacture of a product is progressing
toward the economic value of zero, the maintenance
and monitoring of new cybernetic processes
occupied by fungible, commodified, labor
in a form of indentured servitude. Static model,
dynamic model, alternate contract environments,
enterprise size and labor market functions,
equilibrium characterization, elasticity of response
to productivity shocks: the question in this Third
&n
bsp; Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls
the data. That’s what we’re looking at, labor cheap,
replaceable, self-replicating, marginal, contracted out
into smaller and smaller units. Them? Hordes
of them, of depleted economic, social, value,
who don’t count, in any situation, in anyone’s eyes,
and won’t count, ever, no matter what happens,
the truth that, sooner than later, they will simply be
eliminated. In Hanover Square, a freezing dawn,
from inside bronze doors the watchman sips
bourbon and black coffee in a paper cup, sees
a drunk or drugged hedge fund boy step over
a passed-out body. A logic of exploitation.
A logic of submission. The word alienation. Eyes
being fixed on mediated screens, in semiotic
labor flow: how many generations between
these States’ age of slavery and ours? Makers,
we, of perfectly contemplated machines.
from London Review of Books
JULIE KANE
* * *
As If
As if the corpse behind the crime scene tape
got up and took a bow where it dropped dead;
as if I got a phone call from the grave
and asked its occupant to share my bed.
Nine years ago, we fought and split apart
with our beloved city underwater.
I turned to short-term lovers in the dark;
you moved in with a southern judge’s daughter.
I have to pinch myself to prove you’re back,
though balder, ten pounds thinner, better dressed—
as if the universe had jumped a track,
no hurricane, no choices second-guessed.
At times my ears pick up the strangest sound,
as if the dead were clapping underground.
from Cherry Tree
SUJI KWOCK KIM
* * *
Return of the Native
for Kang,
born in Sonchon, North Korea
Better not to have been born
than to survive everyone you loved.
There’s no one left of those who lived here once,
no one to accuse you, no one to forgive you—
only beggar boys or black-market wives
haggling over croakers and cuttlefish,
hawking scrap-iron and copper-pipes stripped from factories
in the shadow of the statue of the Great Leader.
Only streets emptied of the villagers you knew,
only the sound of steps of those no longer living,
ghosts grown old, grim shadows of what they had once been:
some in handcuffs, some in hoods taken away at midnight,
some roped and dragged into Soviet Tsir trucks
driven to the labor camps that “don’t exist.”
__________
Every absence has a name, a face, a fate:
but who, besides you, remembers they were ever alive?
You don’t know why you were spared,
why you breathe walk drink eat laugh weep—
never speaking of those who had been killed,
as if they had never existed, as if the act of surviving them
had murdered them.
Forget, forget! But they want to be remembered.
Better people than you were shot:
do you think your life is enough for them?
For the silence
is never silent: it says We hate you
because you survived. No. We hate you
because you escaped.
from Ploughshares
LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH
* * *
Tissue Gallery
On the fifth floor
of the medical school,
sequestered from public view,
a black slab lab table
lined with old apothecary jars and twist-top jars
sealed with paraffin wax,
a shoal of not-fish treading bronzy water,
each homunculus labelled
in terms of in-utero days and weeks.
In this jarscape, a palm-size one
sitting with legs crossed,
arms raised protectively,
clasping the top of his head
like a child expecting blows in a parental brawl,
and this golem, a perfect mini-person,
holds fingers curved lightly in front of him,
as if playing a piano chord,
and this quelque chose has blackened soles—
in the womb,
a douen meant to range the barefoot forest,
those faceless stillborn and early-dead children with
backward feet,
who lure human playmates to the woods
and fill their always hungry mouths with little crabs.
All casualties are clipped
with yellowed plastic navel clamps
that look like bones.
Here are twins, one larger than the other,
one malformed
with hydrocephalitic-fissured face,
and this one’s wrinkly forehead,
the face of a worried eighty-year-old concentrating
on his death, an extra epaulette flap on his shoulder,
as if he is sprouting wings;
triplets like three piglets,
one with lots of hair,
one with cauliflower, puckered ear,
one with a purple-black hand reaching out of the
water,
as if in hope to be rescued from drowning.
The thirty-six-weekers are not stored in glassware.
A perfect pair, girl and boy, are on separate cookie baking
sheets,
wrapped in sterile pads, their swaddling blankets.
They are not desiccated, withered, mummified,
quick-frozen, frost-nipped, or sealed in wax.
They look like leatherette dolls in mid-kick stop-motion
animation,
as if they’d only now stopped breathing.
Girl was a low birth weight,
vagina snapped as tightly shut as the seam of a walnut.
Boy is not the color of life, a rich-colored brown boy
bleached out to plasticine-pale, dun-white.
Still, on his cheek-ear-hair, the almost-feel of life.
The abdomen is caved in,
and the testicles are paper-thin, black, crumpled leaves.
Some in the jars were named and tagged on the wrist.
I was told that I cannot tell you the names.
It is a secret between the women
and these medical anomalies.
One is named for a hurricane.
The restos muertos have closed eyes and African features.
They were not colorfast,
so the chemicals have bleached them to albino.
The women, who came with gravid uterus to Puerto Rico
from the Virgin Islands, seeking to save or end
pregnancies,
do not know that these small ones are still here
curled in their womb poses,
each blanched
in its lit-glass aquarium,
lolling in solvent tinted the color of beer,
brandy, honey,
oil, or perfume.
These small floating gods in primer paint, never to be
besprinkled
with blessed water to help them cross over,
never to evaporate, dust-scatter, or waste—they are here
and not here!
What is the shelf life of the unborn?
In the Caribbean, women must travel
from island to island
to get needed health care,
and so these doodads
were not carried home but donated,
no one knows how long ago.
I have been invited here by a doctor who loves the arts,
and whom I like.
I was told beforehand only that I would be viewing
human tissue.
He proposes collaboration, an artistic public exhibition
of these impossible children,
who will never utter “peacock,”
“butterfly,”
“confetti,” “crazy quilt,” “cashmere,” or “soap.”
Skullduggery.
Monster Midway. Gaff joints. Shell games. Sideshow
piebald children.
Human oddities and the science of teratology.
At home, I whisper to the midnight page,
Women of the Virgin Islands, Sistren,
I saw them, and they are okay.
Your small ones are still on the Earth!
from The New Yorker
JOHN KOETHE
* * *
The Swimmer
It was one of those midsummer Sundays . . .
—John Cheever
Photo: sitting by the cabin on Lake Au Train
We rented every summer, reading John Cheever,
Then rowing out in a boat after dinner to fish.
The light would turn golden, then start to fade
